New driverless cars milestone achieved with vehicles interacting

Yesterday (Wednesday 18th April 2018) the DRIVEN consortium demonstrated publicly for the first time the capabilities of its fleet of autonomous vehicles to interact and ‘talk’ to each other. From its headquarters at the RACE Building at the Culham Science Centre in Abingdon, DRIVEN set two of its vehicles, a white and blue 2014 Ford Fusion Titanium hybrid and a 2017 Ford Mondeo hybrid on the roads to show assembled media the latest milestone in the project.

Credit: Andrew Leo

Using their array of lidar sensors, on board computers, and cameras, as well as Oxbotica’s Selenium autonomy and Caesium fleet tracking software, the cars were able to navigate the site autonomously, encountering pedestrians, cyclists and other traffic. Other consortium members Telefonica and Nominet, were on-hand to explain how the DRIVEN consortium is managing the security of this data to protect drivers and other vehicles from cyber security threats.

“This is a significant landmark in the development of vehicle autonomy, which has always been about more than simply self-driving. This public trial demonstrates that our technology is able to share data and information that vehicles are then able to use to plot more effective routes, avoid potential hazards, and anticipate conditions more effectively. This will have huge implications on the way autonomous vehicles will operate and how the future of road travel in the UK looks, improving safety, efficiency and productivity.”

Also commenting, Prof. Paul Newman, co-founder of Oxbotica and Director of the Oxford Robotics Institute said:

“This demonstration shows once again that the UK is at the forefront of the next generation of travel, and that our expertise is second-to-none at a time when the country is looking to develop global trading links We hope and expect that the technology that DRIVEN is developing will be adopted by vehicle manufacturers all over the world as the first wave of autonomous vehicles, as the public imagines them, comes to market. Our work on display here today could revolutionise people’s lives, and the UK will get to share in an industry that could be worth billions in the years ahead.”

Credit: Andrew Leo

DRIVEN, which is in receipt of an £8.6 million government grant designed to stimulate the development of new technologies, is an ambitious project that will see a fleet of Level 4 autonomous vehicles being deployed in urban areas and on motorways, culminating in multiple end-to-end journeys between London and Oxford in 2019. By operating at Level 4 autonomy a vehicle has the capability of driving itself most of the time without any human input.

DRIVEN’s fleet of vehicles can currently be seen conducting urban trials around the streets of Oxford. By Q3 2018 the fleet will be six-strong. The wide-area road testing of the fleet is due to start in late-summer 2018 across a range of environments including low-speed urban and higher speed long distance motorway driving.

A key opportunity for the consortium and one of its members, global re/insurer XL Catlin, is to create a risk assessment tool to enable the user of the autonomous vehicle to make decisions about what level of autonomy and speed is appropriate for a wide set of driving conditions, and a new insurance proposition for autonomous vehicles. By 2019, the consortium plans to have developed a risk assessment tool that automatically processes a range of data from both the vehicle and external sources that surround it, for example traffic control systems.

ENDS

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Adrian Copland, DRIVEN Project Leader at XL Catlin, said:

“While autonomous vehicles are one of the most complex use cases of connected ecosystems in the world, I believe society will hugely benefit from them, providing insurers help make it a commercial –and insurable– reality. Being an active member of the DRIVEN consortium enables us to ingest, analyse and create insight from the huge datasets generated and puts us at the forefront of this ground-breaking innovation.”

Russell Haworth, CEO, Nominet said:

“For autonomous cars to run safely and effectively, the correct framework must be in place, and so our role in DRIVEN is to increase and strengthen the understanding of data flow, sharing and security within the backbone digital infrastructure. Our work addressing infrastructure challenges will help ensure the UK is at the forefront of this exciting field.”

Dr Rob Buckingham, Director of RACE said:

“We see ongoing testing as being vital to reap the potential benefits offered by autonomous vehicles. Our view is that we need different types of test environments: closed test tracks, open public spaces and semi-public spaces. Culham Science Centre is the latter. We have 10km of roads inside a fence with 2000 people going about their normal business, all year round. Furthermore, we have a very strong safety ethos that has contributed to Oxbotica having an unblemished safety record over the 18 months they have been testing AV on our roads. DRIVEN encompasses much more than ‘tech’: we are exploring insurance, cyber security and of course public engagement.”

Llewelyn Morgan, Oxfordshire County Council’s Service Manager for Infrastructure, Innovation and Development, said:

“Oxfordshire was the first council in the UK to consider autonomous vehicles in its transport policy and has been a supporter of the development and application of this technology since its infancy in the UK.”

Iwan Parry, Head of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles at TRL said:

“At TRL we recognise the potentially transformative impact of automated vehicle technologies and the need to support the development of this technology in its early on-road testing. Drawing on TRL’s history of safety research, test method and policy advice, which has contributed to sustained reductions in road traffic collisions and severity over decades, we are very pleased to be supporting Oxbotica’s safety management processes with advice and assistance around risk mitigation and safety case development. These approaches are essential to undertaking trials in public environments and an essential step towards realising the opportunities of autonomous vehicles in the future.

“In addition to risk management and safety advice TRL is also developing a comprehensive understanding of automated vehicle operating risks to enable new insurance services and identifying opportunities to connect automated vehicles with urban traffic control systems, such as TRL’s SCOOT traffic control software, to optimise traffic efficiency in urban areas.

“TRL will further build on capabilities developed in this programme to support the launch of the Smart Mobility Living Lab in London, which will provide an on-road test environment for the testing of increasingly automated vehicle systems.”